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I don't know much about Ethereum so I might be way off here. From what I understand though: 1. The contract you deploy to the blockchain is tied to your accou

I don't know much about Ethereum so I might be way off here. From what I understand though: 1. The contract you deploy to the blockchain is tied to your account where it gets the funds (ether/gas in Ethereum's lingo) to pay for its existence. So if those funds aren't there - the contract is 'dead' ; 2. There are ways to use Ethereum's registrar metadata to use contract's 'name' that isn't hardwired to the implementation so you can change the implementation behind the scenes. You can also have an intermediate contract whose only purpose is to proxy requests to the more involved contract so you can update your 'backend' at will.

vessenes 10y ago
1) Well, contracts have balances, true. The people calling the contracts pay for it to run, so the dead terminology is at best imprecise. If the contract pays out 10 ether in .01 ether increments, and never takes any in, then it will be dead once depleted. On the other hand, people calling the contract pay for the cycles to run it, so one wouldn't typically go dead in that way. 2) I'm not an expert on the registrar situation by any means. But, I do not believe that updating a registrar pointer changes the balances at each contract (the old and new), so while it may be useful for some cases, those which involve balances may be more troublesome if you haven't thought ahead.
- ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
  the 2nd point was to address the fact that the contract can be updated/patched with little if any impact to it's end users. so the new version of the contract gets pushed out, the old one is not in use any longer and just kind of dies off :)
  - vessenes 10y ago
    Right, but for a ponzi scheme contract, that's not a great outcome. Or, say, a crypto-currency, one of the sample apps in Ethereum documentation. Either way, you have a trust problem -- who shall be trusted to transfer out all the value the contract holds?
    - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
      I would imagine that would be something the contract identifies explicitly along the lines of Bitcoin multisig.
      - vessenes 10y ago
        That's one conversation I'm hoping to get launched soon. The sample 'make your own digital currency' code from Ethereum has no such provisions right now. To my mind, it's a little like K&R C showing you how to walk through a string in the 1980s -- adversarial data was not a big concern at the time.
  - dv_dt 10y ago
    How does one assure the the updated contract only fixes bugs and doesn't change the intent of the original contract?

vessenes 10y ago

1) Well, contracts have balances, true. The people calling the contracts pay for it to run, so the dead terminology is at best imprecise. If the contract pays out 10 ether in .01 ether increments, and never takes any in, then it will be dead once depleted. On the other hand, people calling the contract pay for the cycles to run it, so one wouldn't typically go dead in that way. 2) I'm not an expert on the registrar situation by any means. But, I do not believe that updating a registrar pointer changes the balances at each contract (the old and new), so while it may be useful for some cases, those which involve balances may be more troublesome if you haven't thought ahead.

ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
the 2nd point was to address the fact that the contract can be updated/patched with little if any impact to it's end users. so the new version of the contract gets pushed out, the old one is not in use any longer and just kind of dies off :)
- vessenes 10y ago
  Right, but for a ponzi scheme contract, that's not a great outcome. Or, say, a crypto-currency, one of the sample apps in Ethereum documentation. Either way, you have a trust problem -- who shall be trusted to transfer out all the value the contract holds?
  - ChemicalWarfare 10y ago
    I would imagine that would be something the contract identifies explicitly along the lines of Bitcoin multisig.
    - vessenes 10y ago
      That's one conversation I'm hoping to get launched soon. The sample 'make your own digital currency' code from Ethereum has no such provisions right now. To my mind, it's a little like K&R C showing you how to walk through a string in the 1980s -- adversarial data was not a big concern at the time.
- dv_dt 10y ago
  How does one assure the the updated contract only fixes bugs and doesn't change the intent of the original contract?